NATIONAL BAND SAW COMPANY
The National Band Saw Company runs a 21,000-square-foot warehouse dedicated to manufacturing and distributing heavy duty kitchen machinery parts. It turned to SalesPad by Cavallo when it needed a software solution that was easy to work with, could handle complex shipping demands, and didn’t compromise on power or scope.
The Company
National Band Saw Company, based in Lancaster, CA, has been in business since 1953. Founded as a service company in Los Angeles, National Band Saw discovered that providing the best service possible required manufacturing the replacement parts itself.
As its business grew, so did the number of parts the company had on hand. Once it started selling its extras, a new business was born. Today the company runs a 21,000-square-foot warehouse dedicated to manufacturing and distributing heavy-duty kitchen machinery parts.
National Band Saw is now the largest independent manufacturer and supplier of replacement parts for the food machinery service industry, with a product line that includes more than 2,600 parts.
The Challenge
Anyone who’s had exposure to Microsoft Dynamics GP’s user interface can attest to its complexity. According to Harley Frank, president and CEO of National Band Saw, “Great Plains is designed, almost exclusively, it seems, for tech people.”
In addition to its struggles with GP’s complicated interface, National Band Saw contended with demanding operational processes such as drop-shipping.
National Band Saw was in the market for a software solution that was easy to work with, could handle complex shipping demands, and didn’t compromise on power or scope.
The Solution
While GP might be aimed at more technical users, Frank said, “SalesPad is designed for the rest of us.”
The SalesPad by Cavallo® distribution management software acceleration solution accompanies GP, streamlining once-complicated processes and enabling new distribution capabilities. Just as SalesPad requires GP to function, companies need SalesPad to use GP simply and efficiently, National Band Saw Executive Vice President Jason Jasperson said.
“We’ve been on it for seven years now, and I can’t imagine not having it. And as we go forward, SalesPad will be one of the main staples that we keep for our company,” he said. “We’ve been able to increase sales, increase our productivity, keep the same exact business model that we had before, all while still keeping costs down.
“It allows our two guys that process anywhere from 60 to 100 orders a day to do that with about 98% accuracy on a daily basis.”
Harley Frank CEOSalesPad allows us to facilitate growth, and it helps us make projections as we plan out the future of our company. It improved our ability to function dramatically.
Shipping Made Simple
SalesPad’s shipment-management hub takes the headache out of drop-shipping for National Band Saw. They’ve customized their process to the point where the software does nearly all the work for them — labels are printed correctly, addresses are copied accurately, packaging notes are recorded for each order, and shipments are sent out on time, every time.
According to Jasperson, the combination of the FedEx integration and UPS integration supports automation rules and workflow that streamlined National Band Saw’s processes and allowed the company to increase the number of orders it fulfills daily.
“We have 12 or 13 different customized fields that are tied to both our sales order entry screen and the customer card, along with the FedEx integration and the UPS integration,” Jasperson said.
Those customized fields eliminated many of the manual steps that previously slowed the team, ensuring that everything now ships out correctly.
Facilitate Growth with Better Inventory Management
SalesPad’s inventory-management capabilities not only help National Band Saw better manage its current inventory, but facilitate company growth as well. Building a replenishment strategy it can trust is a big contributor to that growth.
“It is much easier to keep track of items that are going close to backorder, or items that need to be replenished: how many of this we have, what we’re using, and how fast we’re using it,” NBS President Frank said. “It is infinitely easier than GP…With just one touch, you get your answer.”
Frank said he is particularly fond of SalesPad’s ability to help him create an appropriate restocking plan, since inventory storage and movement is so important to a manufacturing company such as National Band Saw.
“SalesPad allows us to facilitate growth,” he added, “and it helps us make projections as we plan out the future of our company. It improved our ability to function just dramatically.”
“Before we started using SalesPad,” Jasperson continued, “we were using the Assembly module in GP, and the visibility for inventory management was very limited. There were a lot of clicks and a lot of steps. SalesPad has opened up the scope of things that we can see and made it much easier to see critical inventory information.”
Keep Tabs on What’s Selling with Sales Monitor and Quick Reports
Frank observed that SalesPad’s reporting functions help him monitor sales trends on both a per-customer and per-item basis. That adds up to executive insight into the health of their business. This information is critical when it comes to making strategic decisions on how to advance the company.
“The main way that SalesPad helps a business owner or manager get a good look at the day-to-day happenings in their business is through Sales Monitor. It’s by far one of the best tools that we can use,” EVP Jasperson said. “With the workflow aspect of it, we can see where things are and where they’re going, and we can refresh that information as often as we want to.
“We’ve also created a couple of Quick Reports that allow us to see what our sales are year to date, month to date, or on the previous day. Then, using Sales Monitor, we can calculate out to see where we’re at and determine what we need to do to meet our monthly goals.”
Every department within National Band Saw employs SalesPad in one way or another, and each employee knows how to use it within the context of their particular job. SalesPad’s ability to customize options on a per-user basis make everyone’s job even easier. For example, shipping department employees can be given access to certain layouts and fields, while the customer service reps have access to a different set of screens.
For Jasperson, working with the Cavallo support team has allowed National Band Saw to maximize SalesPad’s benefits to the company’s distribution management. By learning how to customize the layouts and gain access to historical company data (even data that was entered before National Band Saw began using SalesPad), National Band Saw has turned its business software into a tool that helps it accelerate its business and experience more success as a company.
Summing up, Jasperson said, “SalesPad has saved us an unquantifiable amount, simply because of the access to all that information, from something as simple as a tracking number to any number of quick reports. The fact that we’ve been able to customize it so much has been priceless — and it’s been a huge factor in our growth as a company.”